Letter: Anthony Minghella

Mark Shivas writes: One significant piece of work by Anthony Minghella omitted from your obituary (March 19) was the Channel 4 trilogy What If It's Raining? He came to me to discuss it in 1985, smiling from ear to ear but unshaven, from the hospital where he had been up all night waiting for his son Max to be born. I had never read his work before, but this three hours of television writing was touching and recognisably based on experience.

It was titled after the problem of separated parents' visiting day - if the weather was good you could always take the kid to the park, but "what if it's raining?" Michael Maloney, Deborah Findlay and Miles Anderson were the actors, and Stephen Whittaker, new to television, the director. Six months after our meeting it was on the air.

We went on to make the first Storyteller together for Jim Henson and Duncan Kenworthy, and, when I became head of drama at BBC Television a few years later and was in charge of Screen Two, I was able to take the supposed risk of giving him his first chance to direct a film with his astonishing script Cello, which changed its title for the cinema to Truly Madly Deeply. Was there ever a less risky risk?